Nautica came with some other toys in her box set! They're all right. I'll talk next about Laser Prime, who's one of two toys in the set that's a mold I haven't owned before. There's a version of Laser Prime at retail, in normal Optimus Prime colors, and I yawned so hard I actually didn't buy a Transformer for once.

You see, like, okay... back in the Nineties, Laser Optimus Prime was a thing. It was one of the first truly articulated Transformers toys, and so it was Everybody's Favorite Transformer for about a decade. It was an Optimus with a glow-up sword who had a trailer that turned into a base that fired disks and missiles. It was also decoed "wrong." It had a gray chest with red windows and a yellow grill, and the legs were black. And for that entire decade of "Laser Prime is the goddamned best toy ever," there were counterpart rumblings of "OKAY BUT MAKE IT IN REAL OPTIMUS PRIME COLORS."

But here's the thing. It is 2017, and we get a new poseable G1 Optimus Prime toy every few months. You could fill shelves and shelves with all the poseable G1 Optimus Prime toys we've gotten since 2004. And so at this point? Laser Prime's eccentric color scheme is one of the few remaining unique things about him. We've got articulation and trailer bases and electronics and swords in so many other Optimus Primes. So when you do a new toy that's specifically a homage to Laser Prime, why the heck should I care at this point if he's got his "proper" red chest and silver grill and blue legs?

Also the new toy didn't look that great, either, which was another reason to skip it. But if I'm gonna own this mold as Optimus Prime, I'm glad the version Nautica's box set pushed on me was the version that's decoed like Actual Laser Optimus Prime.

Like the other Voyager Class-scale toys in the Titans Return toyline, this Optimus Prime is a Triple Changer. He's not-so-unobviously an Octane pretool, as he goes from robot to tanker truck to jet. (We've seen the upcoming Octane from this mold, and it has a new head and chest, IIRC.) The robot's okay, the tanker truck mode is better, and the jet mode is hot garbage.

But let's talk about the robot mode. Unlike the original Laser Prime, Titans Return Laser Prime's robot transforms into the entire truck, trailer and all. The original's robot was just the cab, which hauled around a trailer accessory. But TR Laser Prime contains multitudes. As such, he doesn't, y'know, transform the same way. The robot mode essentially looks the same, but different parts become different other parts in service of this desired end. There's a pair of helmet antenna built into the collarbone of the robot mode, so that when you plug in the Head Robot Guy, there's some added bulk. But this don't look right, and in fact it looks kinda goofy. Oh well. The robot has both a sword and a hand-held cannon, just like the original, but they don't light up with electronics.

Tanker truck mode is my favorite, and it's easy to explain why. The original Laser Prime's trailer had giant stickers covering most of the trailer, and what these stickers portrayed was a mural of Laser Prime's robot burning down a forest, followed by his name in capital letters with a cursive-y splash of "OCTANE" on top of that. Short the "OCTANE," TR Laser Prime replicates this trailer mural perfectly. So perfectly it appears to be just the same art, with a depiction of the original toy and everything. Why is Optimus Prime burning down a forest? I dunno. But if I ever get a tattoo, I want it to be of myself burning down a forest followed by my own name in all caps. I'd have this running down both of my arms. Anyway, this is super awesome. Not SO awesome that these stickers aren't a tiny tiny tiny bit oversized and so they kind of want to peel off a little at the edges whenever you so much as look at the toy sideways, but still super awesome. It absolutely makes the truck mode, which is otherwise not terrible to begin with.

The jet mode turns the truck backwards, shoves a nose and cockpit awkwardly on the ass-end of the trailer, and barely puts tiny wings and tailfins on there. It's awful, and I don't recommend acknowledging this mode further.

Anyway, Laser Prime definitely only has two modes, and they're both okay to great, while the stickers are a constant annoyance. The original Laser Prime does all this stuff better, though.

Well, our prayers have been answered, and there is finally a real Nautica toy. No longer do you gotta, like, order a 3D printed kit from Shapeways to turn Beast Hunters Starscream into the Lost Light's favorite socially awkward quantum mechanic.

There's a few hurdles in the way to getting her, however. Three, in fact. Their names are Laser Prime, Rodimus, and Quickswitch, and she comes in a giant $100 boxset with them. It's the only way to get her, I'm sorry! Sure, some folks are splitting up their sets on eBay, but Nautica's by far the hottest ticket. She can cost as more than half of the set by herself. Everyone else is an also-ran.

But, y'know, if this is what it takes to get a Nautica, I'm down. These days box sets like hers (titled "Chaos on Velocitron," btw, despite nobody in it being a Velocitronian) exist as a "we can't fit these into our normal wave-by-wave production schedule, so let's dump them off in sets" dealio. It's this or nothing, and I will gladly take this. And, y'know, maybe if Hasbro notices that Nautica was the Big Deal here, it might open them up to more Nauticas later.

Nautica is a retool of Titans Return Blurr. Specifically, she's got a new face and two new propeller wings which plug into the pre-existing 5mm pegholes on her shoulders. She transforms into Blurr's futuristic racecar mode with some propeller wings. It works well enough for Nautica's altmode of "futuristic submersible" if you ignore that Blurr is, um, a convertible. He's got an open top, and now so does this submarine. Whoops.

Blurr as Nautica works strongly for me. It helps that Blurr is, y'know, a fantastic toy (which I was happy to also get retooled as Brainstorm), so Nautica's already starting out with a solid foundation. I also think that, out of all the other current Titans Return figures, Blurr's is the one that best works as both her robot and her vehicle form. Yeah, there's a TR Windblade coming up, but, like, I dunno, TR Windblade is very super obviously a jet, and also TR Windblade's robot mode is more svelt than Nautica is. Sure, Nautica has an hourglass figure, but she's got big boxy kibble on her arms and over her shoulders and big boxy boots. Windblade's just a lady with wings, with tapering legs and skinny arms. A Windblade retool would give us that hourglass figure but leave everything else short, including turning into Super Obviously A Jet And Not A Sea Vessel. Meanwhile, Blurr's altmode is vague enough that it works as anything. It's a wedge. And now it's a wedge with propellers. Bam, it's a water vehicle. Blurr also gives Nautica her big boots, and the wedge-shaped vehicle kibble on her forearms, and the placement of propeller wings on her arms maintains Nautica's silhouette.

Some folks have also suggested Nautica from Scourge, but, like, no. Yeah, Scourge is a Space Boat, but his transformation prevents anything resembling Nautica's silhouette from occurring. If you retool the Boat Shell on his back to be Nautica's propeller wings, you end up with an altmode that's a robot folded up with wings attached to it, and not in the fun way. And if you just retool propeller wings onto the ends of the Boat Shell halves, you end up with a robot that has wings on the ends of wings. It just can't work, I'm sorry. And that's before we get to Scourge's He-Man proportions in robot mode. He is girthy.

Nautica's new head-robot guy partner is unnamed on the packaging. This is dumb.

I also kinda wish they'd given Nautica her magical Doctor Who wrench, but they didn't, and so I just gave her one of Generations Wheeljack's. I also unplug her propeller wings and swap them so they face backwards. This gives her more shoulder kibble bulk, which I think is more evocative of her.

A few months ago, I spent some time marveling at how much Masterpiece Optimus Primal dedicated itself to looking like the CGI model. Well, motherfuckin' Masterpiece Cheetor is here, and he's all like, ha ha ha, that's cute, but get a load of fuckin' me.

Beyond the observations about Generation One Masterpieces I made in regards to MP Primal, here's another: I feel like the G1 Masterpieces.... homogenize the style a little bit. They sand down the edges, scootch things to and fro to make a toy look more what a character looks like in your mind's eye. Heads are shrunk, hands are less big and mitteny, proportions are massaged, etc. But Cheetor, moreso than Primal, makes apparent to me how much of a bigger commitment there seems to be to making the Beast Wars Masterpieces especially media accurate. Yes, sure, it has been remarked upon frequently that the spots on Cheetor's surfaces are purposefully made to look stretched like the 90s CGI surface texturing the cartoon model had. But.... Cheetor's THUMBS, man. Cheetor's CGI model had long-ass freakish thumbs. And yet here they are on this toy. Long-ass freakish thumbs. No sanding down the edges, no massaging the visuals to look more like Every Other Masterpiece Fist. He closes his fingers into a fist and his thumb still stretches far beyond like the head on a coiled snake. It's just Cheetor's actual freakishly awkward CGI hands, replicated in plastic.

And I eat this shit up. I do. It's embracing the wrinkles of Beast Wars and not just our fuzzy happy half-memories of it. It's not Beast Wars: But FIX'D, but just... Beast Wars.

The toy itself, much like Primal, transforms similarly to the original. The cheetah forelegs still end up on the back, the robot forearms still hide under the spine just behind the cheetah head, the robot legs still become sort of cheetah hind legs. There's a t-bone steak-shaped piece on the small of the cheetah's back that flips down to be Cheetor's crotchpiece. The differences between old and new are all in the details. The cheetah forelegs are now articulated (versus not at all) so that they can fold across each other on Cheetor's back. Pulling the robot arms out of the cheetah's back is a little more complicated now; there's way more moving pieces involved to get things just so. The hind-leg-to-robot-leg transformation is... I mean, you still see robot parts easily in cheetah mode. You're going to. It'd be impossible to engineer otherwise. But it minimizes the robot parts as best as one could hope while also making a more natural cheetah hind-leg shape.

And, yeah, the cheetah head on the robot mode chest is fake. The real cheetah head is buried inside the robot torso JUST BEHIND the fake robot mode cheetah head. There's little wire cheetah whiskers rooted into the real cheetah head, which bend a little when shoved inside the torso cavity, and you kind of have to groom them back into shape whenever you transform him back. Whether I think this whole charade is a good creative decision changes depending on what time of day it is.

There is a crazy amount of paint on this guy. I spent a good while trying to identify places on it that were unpaintable nylon plastic, because 99% of his parts have paint on them somewhere. But there are a few small hinges here and there that appear to be unpaintable nylon, like the yellow inside the cheetah forepaw's wrists. (Unpaintable nylon is generally used for structural reasons, which is why HasTak bothers to use it at all, and it's why you can find it buried within MP Cheetor's joints only.) All of Cheetor's gold is paint, so you don't hafta worry about GPS. Altogether, MP Cheetor is just ... visually dense.

Like MP Primal, he has a set of swappable heads with different expressions for both robot and beast modes. For robot mode, he's got Stoic and Grrrr Angry and OH SHIT, and for beast mode, he's got Half-Lidded Stoned, Grrrr Angry, and OH SHIT. The beast mode head's jaw is openable in each iteration, and also there's three sets of eyes you can swap into whichever beast mode head you're using. One set looks left, another center, another right. It's not QUITE as elegant an eye articulation solution as with the Figma Elsa (let it gooooooo) I have where the eyeballs are literally articulated (but you have to use a little pick to move them), but I appreciate that this is an option at all.

MP Cheetor comes with two guns. The original toy had two guns, as well, but only one of them made it onto the cartoon showed up much at all. The original toy had a water squirter gun fashioned from Cheetor's intestines. You heard me. Anyway, that's the one that was frequently represented on the cartoon. The Masterpiece version doesn't watersquirt, sadly, but it does finally paint those intestines pink. The second weapon, was Cheetor's cheetah ass. You ripped off his ass and folded back the tail and there was a barrel under there and Cheetor grasped his own ass and shot his ass at you. The Masterpiece version is very similar, only differing in how the tail folds underneath instead of over the top. My favorite part is how the Masterpiece version of the gun borrows some of Cheetor's midsection and sculpts them into the buttocks-shapes of the original toy's ass gun. Cheetor's ass gun is no longer made out of ass, but transforms from non-ass into a more ass-like shape. For nostalgia.

You can stow both weapons on his back in robot mode.

THIS TOY IS AMAZING. It is not perfect, though. One, he's really bad at holding his ass gun. It doesn't peg into his palm like the gut gun, and you kind of just have to wedge it loosely into his grasp and hope gravity and friction work. Secondly, and this is the biggest, he doesn't seem to, like, peg together in his cheetah midsection in beast mode. Mind, when you set him down in cheetah mode, this self-resolves, because he is jointed so that he closes himself up if he's standing on something. However, once you pick him up, he kind of flops open like a real cat hanging over you lazily but if a real cat also showed you the robot parts inside him while he did so. Cheetah mode is FOR DISPLAY ONLY, it seems. You pick him up to play with him and he kind of goes ploop. It's weird, because the rest of him is so satisfyingly stiff.

That's it, that's what's wrong with him, setting aside the "is the fake cheetah head on his chest a bad thing" situation. There is so much love in him, though, those bits are overshadowed pretty strongly. I don't even fucking like Cheetor that much, and I have fallen hard for this action figure.

NOW WHERE IS MY DINOBOT, GIVE ME DINOBOT, HE WAS ANNOUNCED, SHOW ME PICTURES

Look, you guys, you have to take my word on this. Titans Return Kup's colors are pretty good! He's not, like, various flavors of cyan as most photographs of him seem to claim. I swear to you, his torso, crotch, and half of his legs are this amazing vibrant teal. This amazing vibrant teal is impossible to photograph correctly, and not even Photoshop color correction can produce it. I tried. I can get close. You will look at these photographs and think, okay, whatever, that's kinda teal, but nothing to write home about. But it is. You would write home about this teal.

Unlike Sixshot (and Perceptor), Kup is not just his 1980s toy with more articulation. He's the flavor of Titans Return toys that tries to do a little something new. Mind, he still looks generally like his original robot and futuristic pickup truck in either mode, but how he gets there is a fun jaunt. For example, on the original 1986 Kup toy, you merely bent him back at the waist, tucked his arms under his hood, and generally you were done. This new version's a bit more complicated. The entire lower third of the vehicle, from front hubs to back hubs, unwraps and then rewraps to form his legs. The arms fold out of the back of the cab, which has an open drivers compartment which you have to compact in on itself for robot mode. The head, as always in Titans Return Deluxes and larger, is a little robot guy. His guns can combine into a larger gun which the head guy can ride, or it can plug into his back to replace the missing "hood" that his new transformation no longer creates.

I've talked about the teal, but beyond that, Kup's colors seem to take their cues from his original toy (and Marvel Comics appearances) rather than his appearances in animated media and subsequent comic book series. The dark gray helmet (and partially dark gray legs) are a clue to this. To me, this means this toy represents Marvel Kup, who I also call Murderkup, because he likes to murder. His earliest characterizations in the Marvel comics were that he had an insatiable battlelust. Mind, this was partly because the writer needed counterpoints to the more pacifistic Fortress Maximus to keep the desired narrative happy, but in the absence of Kup's "I'm old and I have many stories about being old!" characterization from the cartoon, his battlelust is a striking take. He just wants to kill and kill, because it's fun and he's good at it. I think this might have seeped a little into Kup's IDW appearances, where, sure, he's an old guy (and currently billions of years older than the universe itself, which is a.... long story), but he's also a member of the ultraviolent Wreckers.

I'm just sad he doesn't get to have a cy-gar this go-round 'cuz it'd futz with his Titan Masters gimmick. Also because Hasbro would never sculpt a damned cigar into their robot toy for children. That too.

Toys from the current Transformers team seem to fall into two categories: Slightly reworked designs of old toys with new Transformations, and.... the old toy, but now with knees. Titans ReturnSixshot is definitely the latter. He's essentially the original 1987 Sixshot toy with articulation added. And GUESS WHAT. I'm happy with him.

Maybe it's because I never had the original toy? I don't remember being particularly interested in him, anymoreso than with other toys in the Transformers pack-in catalogs from my youth. Possibly because he was never in any real fiction. He shows up for three seconds in the cartoon, and spends half a second in each mode, and in the Marvel comic he only appears wadded up into the corner of one panel in a group shot. Bizarrely, he had an IDW one-shot issue based on him, but even that story never landed with me.

However, over in the Headmasters anime, he appears a bunch, and in the bad English dub he referred to himself as a "ninja consultant" while the voice actor did all his lines into a paper cup. That's the most endearing the character has ever been to me.

But this toy of him, I really like it. He turns into "six" "things," and while each mode is mostly distinct, they're all obviously made out of the same semblage of parts. They kind of have to be. This toy isn't magic. When you have a toy turn into a robot, a winged wolf, a "submarine," a jet, a car, and a tank, a lot of that toy's parts are going to be pulling double- or triple-duty. Obviously, the robot limbs also become the wolf limbs. Obviously, the jet's wings are going to feature in a lot of the other modes. Obviously, a lot of the non-wheeled modes are gonna have wheels somewhere on them.

The enjoyment, though, is how relatively simple it is to get him from one mode to another. The trade-off for "six modes all using the same limited amount of parts" is that there's no chore in transformation, and there's so many possible transformations to do. You're always just a few steps away from another mode, keeping the toy in play. YOU ARE NEVER SATISFIED. Wait, that sounds bad. Well, it's not!

It should come as no surprise that the robot mode is the strongest. He looks like a robot! He's got a chest and limbs and a head! Definitely a robot. Because Sixshot is Leader Class, he's big enough that his requisite little head-robot-dude only transforms into his face. His helmet fits around that, and also stows inside the chest while in the other five modes. This means you technically don't have to remove the head-robot-dude for transformation if you don't want to.

But if you do, your winged wolf mode is going to be missing the back of his head. In this mode, the robot face sits directly behind the wolf's skull, filling in that plastic void. This also gives the winged wolf mode the same Naruto ninja headband the robot mode does (under his helmet). This is fantastic. The winged wolf mode itself is okay. It's good by default just for being a beast mode, as beast modes rock. But it's fairly perfunctory. The arms become forelimbs and the legs become hindlimbs. The gun pegs on as the tail.

To make a jet you fashion everything into a wedge. Everything except the wings. To make a car, you compress everything into a box. To make a tank, you bend the car in half and fold down the rest of his treads.

The sixth mode is a submarine. It is the original toy's gun mode upside-down.

This is hilarious.

I dunno, he's fun to fiddle with. I like him. However, he's coming out later in more interesting colors (redecoed with a new head as his own son, Quickswitch) as part of a box set that includes Nautica. So if you only want the mold once, and also want Nautica, I'd hold out. I want both versions, because I am eccentric.